N8 Identity Unveils Identity, Access Governance Solution

N8 Identity, a Burlington, Ontario-based dedicated identity and access management (IAM) solution provider, has released its Employee Lifecycle Manager for Retail which -- based on N8 Identity’s flagship IAM solution Employee Lifecycle Manager (ELM) -- was designed to eliminate governance, access and risk problems unique to the retail industry.

“Managing employee access rights and task assignments at volume despite massive levels of churn is an ongoing problem for retailers,” said Leslie Hand, research director, IDC Retail Insights. “These challenges are compounded by the rise of the empowered Omni-channel consumer whose cross-portal engagement habits must be tracked and managed by the retailer as well. Retailers need identity and access management solutions that understand the unique challenges of the retail business while helping support the bottom line.”

The new system addresses the following industry needs:

• Compliance on scale: The proliferation of technology out to the store network means that retailers must manage employee access rights at an incredible volume. In addition, the reality of annual turnover rates approaching 75 percent or more translates into an IAM nightmare for many retailers. ELM for Retail delivers a simplified attestation process that certifies access on a massive scale with minimal effort and complexity, even for retailers juggling thousands of employees over hundreds of locations.
• Real-time on-boarding and offboarding: “On-demand” onboarding enables new employees to be onboarded and receive appropriate system accounts and access within minutes of being hired, with offboarding just as easy. This helps solve the IAM challenges and complexity presented by same-day onboarding and immediate offboarding native to the high-turnover retail workforce.
• Easy access rights provisioning: ELM for Retail’s rule engine and federated IAM environment easily enables task-based identity management at the store level for employees who are temporary, working in multiple locations or transferring to a different store.
• Integration with retail-specific solutions: ELM for Retail provides “out of the box” integration with everyday retail and corporate technologies, including POS, HRMS, ATS and ITSM tools. This drastically reduces the costs associated with customizing generic IAM solutions.

In addition, ELM’s capabilities such as certification of access, segregation of duties (SoD) enforcement and consistent compliance controls across enterprise systems significantly improve the security posture of N8 Identity’s retail clients. Also, ELM for Retail comes prepackaged with full interoperability with many of the retail industry’s most-used applications, including POS, inventory management and ERP (including SAP), timekeeping, Portal, LMS and others, accelerating time to value by decreasing the need for customization.

“N8 Identity understands the unique challenges facing retailers today,” said Jay O’Donnell, president and CEO of N8 Identity. “Omni-channel customer experiences, exploding technology requirements within the stores, and razor-thin margins make it imperative that the IAM solution selected delivers compliance, process efficiencies and cost savings. In our experience, the rapid churn and scale of the identities to be managed across a variety of complex scenarios are poorly addressed by general purpose IAM solutions. ELM for Retail solves the expanding governance challenges faced by retailers by delivering continuous identity compliance, automated business processes and lower costs.